The Fifth Dawn

Writer - Cory J. Herndon
Cover art - Jim Murray
First release - May 2004

SUMMARY
We start in an unexpected place: with Yert, the controller of a Reaper (=Harvester) that Glissa met in The Moons of Mirrodin and who was said to have been killed in The Darksteel Eye. He’s having visions of worlds without metal and a Mirrodin without life, while someone is telling him to wake up.

We then cut to Glissa and Slobad, who are still on the edge of the new lacuna created by the birth of the green sun. They discover the magic has caused loads of mutations to the wildlife. There is some random fighting with giant wasps and rats, and then the two are captured by the Viridian elves. Turns out that since Glissa left a whole bunch of elves disappeared, most of them vanishing around the creation of the new sun. Also, Glissa’s sister Lyese is still alive, but thinks Glissa is responsible for their parents deaths. So Glissa is put on trial. She tells the assembled people about her adventures and most seem to believe her. Lyese doesn’t though and attacks her. In the scuffle the two of them and Slobad are separated from the assembly. Then aerophins attack.

During the fighting Bruenna shows up, who tells them levelers have exterminated her village and are now coming for the Tangle. There is some more fighting during which Glissa is captured by Malil and taken into the world’s interior. During this excursion they discover there are now countless artifact creatures working to transform the inside of Mirrodin, and that the vedalken have been mutated into fifteen foot tall soldiers of Memnarch who communicate fully telepathically. Glissa escapes, but Slobad is captured instead. After torturing the goblin for a while, Malil is tasked with retrieving Glissa, retrieving all the soul traps (which are apparently scattered all around Mirrodin) and conquering the entire surface world.

Glissa, Bruenna and Lyese go to Taj-nar, finding it besieged by nim once again. Only now the Mephidorss is expanding into the Glimmervoid by acres per hour. The good guys decide to try and forge an alliance of the various peoples of Mirrodin against Memnarch. Glissa, Lyese and Raksha head into the Oxidda mountains to meet up with the Krark-Clan, but are attacked by the Vulshok Alderok Vektro leading a bunch of goblins. They defeat him, but Geth turns up. Or, well… just his head does!

Ignore all the Phyrexiany bits in this picture. We're really just talking about the head.

The decapitated head tells them Yert is now a vampire and has taken control of the Mephidross. He has also captured Bruenna (who had gone into the Dross looking for Geth as a potential ally) and wants Glissa to come to him in exchange for her freedom. Glissa, a few leonin sky-knights and Geth’s head (in a bag, helping Glissa after being promised a body when the adventure is over) go to the Vault of Whispers. Yert turns out to be working for Memnarch, so there is once again a lot of fighting. While running through the Vault Glissa finds Bruenna hooked up to some machinery. She unplugs the mage and…

…wakes up 5 years later. Turns out the machine was some sort of stasis trap, triggered by removing Bruenna. In the intervening years the Mephidross has spread further, now covering half the surface, Taj-Nar has fallen and the last remaining hold out against Memnarch is a leonin/goblin alliance in Krark-Home in the Oxidda mountains, led by Dwugget, Raksha’s cousin Yshkar and his wife… Lyese! Bruenna did get out back in the day though, and after 5 years she was finally able to teleport Glissa out as well.

We also learn that Slobad is now brainwashed into working for Memnarch, though a small part of his brain still tries to resist. His own body is hanging from a wall somewhere, tortured and limbless, but his mind has been plugged into Mirrodin as a whole, and through control of the myr and other artifact creatures he has been turning the entire plane into a machine that can transfer sparks by creating giant silver spires all over the plane and infusing them with blinkmoth serum. Memnarch himself has spent all this time in hibernation, consuming vast amounts of serum to remove all the flesh from his body.

The rebels have discovered Memnarch is about to come out of hibernation, so they make a plan. Yert is an amateur necromancer compared to Geth and has to use an artifact called the Miracore to control the nim. The good guys want to take the core away from him, use it to fight back, and then get Glissa to kill Memnarch with it as soon as he emerges from his cocoon. The plan is made… but immediately Krark-Home is attacked by all of Memnarchs forces. Including Yert, so Glissa kills him (by using a teleportation device to telefrag him!) and takes the Miracore, only for Malil to pass by on a flying device and literally yoink it away from her.

She follows him into the Tangle and kills him with the help of Raksha. The former kha was exiled for having gone insane and attempting to destroy Taj-Nar with a mana bomb, but he now reveals to Glissa that the bomb was actually placed by Vektro. Turns out he was actually a bodyless mind controlling entity working for Memnarch, who has been controlling Lyese ever since they’ve defeated the Vulshok he was inhabiting previously. They can’t act on this knowledge though, as they are on a timetable. The two of them head into the core to go kill Memnarch.

On the surface the battle rages on. Lyese/Vektro kills Yshkar, but Dwugget mortally wounds Lyese, causing Vektro to flee. Bruenna manages to heal Lyese just in time.

I miss the Weatherlight Saga, when I could easily find relevant cards to use as illustrations. I guess I'll have to make do with a big green crystal rhino-man who isn't in the story at all...

On the inside Glissa fights multiple incarnations of Malil and eventually finds Slobad, both what is left of his body and a speechless myr who tells her its him through sign language. Then she is captured by Vektro inhabiting the body of one of the Malil’s, who also takes the Miracore. Memnarch wakes up and promptly kills Vetro for being “the creation of a tainted mind”, proving that removing his flesh hasn’t made him any saner. He is about to use the Ascension Web Slobad build to use the alignment of the suns and all the soul traps to transfer Glissa’s spark to himself when Geth sends a bunch of nim after him and Slobad rebels and attacks him with constructs. Then Glissa retrieves the Miracore and channels green mana through it to destroy Memnarch, though in the process the two of them fall into Mirrodin’s Core.

The resulting explosion destroys all the soul traps, killing everyone on Mirrodin. But all the souls need to go somewhere, and Slobad is still hooked up onto the Mirrodin-wide Ascension Web, so…

Slobad wakes up, hale and whole, and is greeted by Karn. Karn explains that he is the creator of the world, that Memnarch was subconsciously keeping him from reentering the place, and that he was sending the flare-visions to Glissa to help topple his rogue creation. He also explains that Slobad is now a planeswalker with Glissa’s spark. He offers to mentor him and show him the multiverse, but Slobad wants none of it. He just wants to bring his friends back to life.

At this point Karn still looks like this, presumably.

Slobad and Glissa wake up on a mostly empty Mirrodin. They find Geth’s head, sitting on a box containing two soul traps and the Mirari. He relays a message from Karn: the two of them can smash the traps and return to the home planes of their souls, or they can stay and wait for Karn, who will eventually come to collect the Mirari. They decide to stay.

We then see Bruenna, Dwugget, Lyese and Raksha on another world, unaware of their previous existence, signing a peace treaty.

REVIEW
I’m very much in two minds about Fifth Dawn. On the one hand, as a story on its own it’s much more interesting than the previous two installments. There is a lot more happening, so we don’t have to sit through so much filler, Memnarch has a much better evil plan with the whole “turning an entire plane into a machine to transfer sparks”, rather than just standing in a big blast and hoping for the best, there are some really cool moments (telefragging!) and a lot more characters with, you know, character. Cory Herndon clearly has fun writing baddies like Geth, Yert and Vektro, and even gets some mileage out of previous ciphers like Bruenna.

On the other hand though… it just doesn’t deliver on what the previous books have set up. The mystery about Mirrodin’s past is just forgotten. We don’t even have Bosh to occasionally make a cryptic remark anymore. We learn nothing more about the origins of the Kaldra Guardian. The Vedalken democracy plot is unceremoniously dropped. Various mysteries are left hanging, like where the Blinkmoth came from and where they go during the launch of the moons…

Well, they are Blink-moths...

In addition to dropped stuff, there are also outright contradictions here...

• At the start of the book, Glissa knows Memnarch had wanted to use the birth of the green sun to take her spark. Glissa never learned this fact though. The readers only know this from the chapters in The Darksteel Eye where he was ranting to the imaginary Karn.
• She also thinks about how the trolls had bought them time “to reach the Radix end help trigger the explosion of the new green moon into the sky.” Actually, she was going to the Radix because she needed to fight Kaldra, and green mana was the strongest there. The new moon was a complete surprise to her.
• During her trial she talks about the soul traps. Another thing the reader only learned through Memnarch and Glissa never heard about.
• Oh, and Al-Hayat’s death somehow saved her life now, and the wolf “had been more like a surrogate father … sometimes she missed the big wolf almost as much as her mother and father”… none of which I remember from the last book.
• The reason Lyese thinks Glissa was leading the levelers who killed their parents was because she saw Glissa holding her mother’s ring and mistook the levelers chasing her for them following her. The problem with that is that Glissa didn’t flee the scene, she was knocked out and dragged along by a leveler. And she didn’t find her mother’s torn off hand with the ring until after she had woken up in the levelers’ lair.

Too soon?

These things make it feel like Cory Herndon had gotten a list of what was supposed to happen in the previous books, but never actually got to read them. Now perhaps The Darksteel Eye was still being finished when work on The Fifth Dawn began, but surely somebody should be overseeing things to make sure everything that is supposed to go into the novels actually ends up there?

Now, let’s turn to the biggest omission: the whole oil/Mycosynth plot just gets dropped. Why did the Mycosynth never spread to the surface? Why was it turning artifact creatures into flesh? Where did the oil come from? Heck, just what was the oil exactly? Despite it being featured at the very start of the trilogy and it being instrumental in creating both the setting and the main conflict through Memnarch, it is never brought up in the concluding novel! We will learn a bit more about it from online articles, and Will McDermott later revealed on fan forums its intended origins as an unfinished Phyrexian superweapon, and that it turning artifact creatures into fleshlings was essentially just a bug, but omitting these explanations from the stories themselves is a pretty bad move in my opinion.

Will has also said that the original plan was for the mystery of the oil to be revealed over the course of the trilogy, and that he doesn’t know why it was dropped later. Cory Herndon, in the same forum thread, has said he can’t talk about it and that while he knew a few possible origins of the oil, he has no idea about the official origin. So it seems it wasn't simply a writer doing his own thing and the editor not paying attention. It sounds like at some point during the writing of the trilogy someone changed to plans to not include the reveal. Much later, when Scars of Mirrodin came out, MaRo said that this was actually deliberate:

"The Phyrexian's return was planned back when Mirrodin was first put together. It was interwoven subtly so that hardcore Magic-story fans would get a hint that something was wrong without quite knowing what that thing was. (The mycosynth wasn't a red herring after all.) Then when we returned to Mirrodin we could tell the story I'm about to talk about."

If this was the case, I will still stand by my statement that this was a bad move. Letting a plotline dangle for 6 years is terrible pacing. How many people even remembered the original mystery by the time Scars was released? What's even worse is that it was 6 years without any indication we were ever getting a resolution. Remember, this is the first cycle of the planeshopping era. Magic was notoriously bad at reusing its old settings up to this point. We had no idea that returning for a sequel was even an option! We got a tiny teaser for a return in Time Spiral, when Karn noted something was off there, but it was so vague that at the time people wondered if it was another hint that the original Mirrodin story happened in the far future! Finally, letting a story linger for so long is dangerous, as who knows if you (or the people succeeding you in your job) still want to tell the same story by the time you finally return to it? And even if you/they do, such a long gap is just inviting continuity errors.

Eventually, in Scars of Mirrodin, we would officially learn the Phyrexian origin of the oil, though it was then said that the oil had been inside Karn’s heartstone all along rather than being brought via Jeska/Karona. A bit of an unfortunate change, as it contradicts the one paragraph that had been officially published about the oil (which stated it had lain dormant for a long time until it followed Karn & Jeska to this “pristine new world”). Hilariously (if that’s the right word) Doug Beyer’s article revealing this new origin of the oil actually quotes that paragraph, showcasing the contradiction… Of course, that would hardly be the only ret-con in Scars of Mirrodin. Setting an entire block on a plane with just three people on it is very tricky, so the “everybody got send back to their original plane” ending got turned into just the oldest generation disappearing.

Which brings me to the biggest problem with the "it was planned all along" story. Not only was Mirrodin the very first plane of the new planeshopping era, so I imagine WotC had no idea how things would pan out and if they were ever going to return there, but also… if you were planning to return to Mirrodin from the get go… why would you allow the publication of a novel that ends with the eradication of all life on the plane, except for one elf, one goblin, and one zombified head?! MaRo’s statement sounds more like trying to talk things around after the fact. Then again, the difference between what Will McDermott and Cory Herndon have said on forums sounds like plans were altered. So... maybe things were planned, they were just planned very, very badly?

To bring all this moaning about Scars of Mirrodin era continuity back to the Fifth Dawn review: not including the origin of the oil in the original trilogy was a mistake in my opinion. There was no indication that it was ever going to get picked up upon, especially considering the VERY definite ending of Fifth Dawn, which leaves the original Mirrodin trilogy feeling like a half-finished mess of dropped plotlines. And even if a sequel was planned all along, 6 years is simply too long. Not only because that is a frustratingly long time to wait, but also because priorities can change a lot over such a period and you never know if future creative teams still want to tell the same story you set up, or even if they still have access to all your original work. It’s an invitation for ret-cons and continuity errors.

I didn't use this one yet, right?

Yet despite all that, I did enjoy the book as a fun action romp. It has cool fight scenes which actually advance the plot, a plot that involves the fall of almost the entire world to the bad guys, which is much more ambitious than the “tour across the 5 colors” plot of Moons or the “let’s waste time with a fetch quest” plot of Eye.

One thing remains the same though, the trilogy is still at its best when it makes some time for interpersonal stuff. When Glissa and Slobad are awaiting the trial, they talk about what Lyese must be feeling, and about how they miss Bosh. It’s no super deep drama, but it does a good job endearing the characters to me. One of my favorite scenes is where Glissa and Lyese are having an argument and Slobad goes “EVERYBODY QUIET!” and then chews both elves out for fighting when they are the only family they have left. Bruenna then says “I couldn’t have said it better!” and he turns on her to give her an earful as well… before realizing he doesn’t have anything to say against her. I don’t know if this explanation really does it justice, but it is a scene that manages to be funny and emotional at the same time. At the end, when Slobad doesn’t even blink when Karn tells him he’ll have to sacrifice his spark to bring his friends back to life, the little goblin has really cemented his position as the best character in the trilogy. Shame what happened to him according to the Scars block lore…

And I guess that last line is sort of emblematic of The Fifth Dawn. On its own, I would call it perfectly enjoyable. But put in the context of larger continuity… its refusal to pick up on the plot lines from the previous two books kind off ruins the trilogy for me, and the reveals and ret-cons of Scars block kind of ruin The Fifth Dawn itself.

TRIVIA

• The elven city in the Tangle is called Viridia.
• One of the judges for Glissa’s trial is Yulyn, the greatest hunter in the Tangle before Glissa came along, who was missing for some time. We don’t learn where he was in that time, and he just sort of drops out of the story after the trial.
• The other judges are Lendano, one of the oldest elves in the Tangle, and Ghonthas, the leader of the Sylvok humans, who it later turns out was controlled by Vektro during the trial, making sure the Viridians didn’t execute Glissa so Memnarch could later steal her spark.
• Like Yulyn, Raksha’s new healer Shonahn also gets quite a backstory, having traveled the world and even seeing the red lacuna.
• Ushanti has “fallen out of favor”, and makes no further appearance.
• Baby goblins are called goblets.
• Glissa continues to be racist, thinking Sylvok are all creeps
• The thing Yert controlled is still called a Reaper, but elsewhere Slobad does refer to having seen harvesters as well.
• Raksha is now called Raksha Golden Cub all of a sudden.

• Raksha mentions getting help from the human tribes “starting with the Caravaners”. We don’t actually ever see them.
• There is a cultural prohibition among the leonin against giving weapons to field commanders. Before the Great Dakan united the tribes they settled their disputes through combat between champions, and if any champions accepted outside help they had lost the duel and dishonored their tribe.
• Speaking of the Great Dakan, he’s the only character in leonin history we ever hear about, and responsible for just about every other aspect of their culture that gets mentioned.
• Neurok siblings can sometimes feel each other’s emotions over long distances. Glissa and Lyese have the same thing. Once. When it is plot relevant. It is never explained and never brought up again.
• The leonine also have a myth about a world within the world. This world is named (by the Great Dakan, of course) Tav Rakshan. Rakshan means Eternal Sun. Raksha’s name means Lord of the Eternal Sun.
• A metal world gets really weird sometimes. For example, Raksha and Glissa share a cup of steaming oil, made from razor grass and thresher oil.
• Raksha gives Glissa a longsword at one point:

“He claimed it had been a gift to Great Dakan [of course] for the elves of old. Glissa didn’t bother to point out that a lot of the elves of old were still in the Tangle, they just forgot everything once in a while.”

• This suggests it’s not just the bad memories people lose in the rebuking ceremony, and shows just how heretical Glissa’s refusal to go through with it must have been. It would have been interesting to explore that a little more.

• Vektro claims to have been made chief of Oxiddagg village. I guess perhaps that actually applied to Alderok, who he was controlling at the time.
• There is some talk of Alderok Vektro looking smaller after they take of his gauntlets. That doesn’t get explained, but I assume it’s a reference to the card VulshokGauntlets.
• The leonin have a myth about an elf fighting alongside the Great Dakan (of course), whose name was lost to time, but who they call the Maneless One. That’s some A+ anagram-punnery right there.
• Yert was apparently turned into a vampire simply because Geth fed him to the one vampire in the entire Dross. Kinda stupid of Geth, who previously bragged about controlling the Dross through that one vampire.
• Yert still has hands, with drinking spikes growing from the underside of his wrists. So I guess that change in look from Mephidross Vampire to Black Coven Vampire and Sangromancer isn’t as bizarre as it seems. Mirrodin vampires have always been variable in their look.
• The last surviving leonin who accompanies Glissa into the Dross is called Ellasha. After Glissa is put in stasis she is the one who rescues Bruenna, but dies in the process. The last time we see her she tells Glissa “Make sure the loremasters hear of the leonine who died today”. So eh, I guess that means it’s my job to tell you all about her?
• In the time skip Bruenna lost a hand and starts wearing a vedalken prothesis with 3 extra fingers and an extra thumb.
• Lyese starts flirting with Raksha almost immediately and then marries Yshkar during the five year gap. This puts Yshkar in the company of Kyyrao Grenmw, Jedit Ojanen and Mirri as catfolk who fancy human(oid)s. Kinda strange how specifically catfolk keep ending up in these situations...

• After the five year gap there are hardly any blinkmoth left in the sky, as the vedalken en Memnarch have been using them up for serum.
• The Miracore has a similar pattern of symbols on it as the Kaldra artifacts, and is said to be as old as Memnarch. We don't learn its origins though.
• One of the most fearsome monsters that attack Krark-Home are quake-beasts, huge constructs with “ovoid bodies with no discernible head, supported by over a dozen radial segmented limbs … at each tapered end of the ovoid a pair of pitted silver hammers pounded the mountain mercilessly, sending tremors into the tunnels below”. The goblins use charbelchers against them.
• When Alderok keels over dead (because Vektro has left him), Raksha asks “Do humans do that often?” to Lyese. Up to that point I hadn’t really realized just how few humans there actually are in this story. The only ones of importance are Bruenna, Geth and Yert, although the latter two are a zombified head and a vampire by the time of Fifth Dawn.
• After the five year gap the mycosynth spires are gone entirely, replaced by the silver needles Slobad has been building to turn Mirrodin in a spark transplantation device.
• Among the robot minions of robo-Slobad are a whole bunch of mini-Memnarchs. They aren’t called Memnites yet, but that is clearly what they are. Geth’s head gets put on top of one of those in the end.

• Karn mentions a few interesting worlds while describing the Multiverse to Slobad:

“I could show you worlds you’ve never imagined. Galaxies the size of a thimble, pocked universers, alternate realities, worlds shaped like perfect cubes, planes as flate as a serving dish that ride on the back of giant reptiles.”

• Cory Herndon has confirmed that his is a Discworld reference, so I guess that entire series is part of Magic canon as well. I had better get to reviewing those! I could use some good Pratchett stories after covering the Otaria Saga and Mirrodin block!
• Geth wasn’t returned home because as an undead he no longer has a soul. So I guess there could still be a whole bunch of nim on Mirrodin for Glissa and Slobad to fight.
• The soul traps, and especially the fact that people still die when they get shattered, despite their ancestors having lived on Mirrodin for many generations, raise interesting questions about reincarnation, as well as the problem of whether population can increase on Mirrodin. I guess the Scars of Mirrodin ret-con of the vanishing fixes this though. The souls that were reincarnated have been send home, the newly created ones are still around.
• Slobad suggests naming the green sun Lyese.
• In the other world we see in the epilogue, Bruenna’s community is called the “humans of Lume” and Lyese’s “the elves of Jilad”, suggesting that either they remember something from Mirrodin, or that the places on Mirrodin were named after their original homes.
• The peace treaty they are signing has been in the works for months and will end "thousands of years of pointless conflict", so either their memories have been completely altered, or time has somehow been rewritten. Let’s go with the first option, and not open the can of worms that is the second one.

CONTINUITY

• Glissa said to have her abilities thanks to the spark, though in previous stories we’ve never seen a spark do anything as blatant as cause huge artifact-destroying blasts before a planeswalker’s ascension. Later Karn says he was able to send her visions due to “a tentative link” he shared with Glissa through the spark, so maybe he was also sending her power? Or maybe Glissa’s is the first of the special sparks we’ve been seeing in later years (Yanggu’s “bring my dog along” spark, Rowan & Will’s shared spark…)
• Chunt was metal-less, hinting that the metal grew over time. In Glissa’s last flare the elves were transformed by their journey to Mirrodin. But maybe it was a conceptual vision caused by Karn? In an earlier vision she also sees an already crab-like Memnarch scuttling across a still empty Mirrodin, and he didn’t get such that bodyshape until much later, and in The Darksteel Eye she saw a metal creature attacking elves a non-metal plane, which doesn't line up with how the soultraps brought people over to Mirrodin. I guess Karn was just sending her generic "Memnarch bad" visions, rather than accurate historical records.
• Glissa now also says “Seven hells”, so I guess some knowledge of Phyrexia, or at least vocabulary about Phyrexia, made it into larger Mirran culture. Which is ironic, considering what happens next to the plane…
• One of Malil’s vedalken minions is called Orland, presumably the same Orland from The Darksteel Eye. He gets killed quite unceremoniously when Glissa tosses him out of the lacuna.
• During his vision in the prologue, Yert sees a few things that don’t really remind me of anything, but also “a flesh-and-bone warrior swinging a savage chain in a grimy pit.” Let’s assume that he’s seeing Chainer in a Cabal fighting pit, just so we have another continuity reference.

• Karn says “His [Memnarch’s] certainty-perhaps faith is a better word-was so strong, that the specter of his false Karn kept me from manifesting on this plane.” The Future Sight Fat-Pack booklet will tie this into the Time Spiral crisis on Dominaria:
• Here’s how Karn describes the Mirari:

“It is-was-will be-an artifact or great power. It was also intelligent. Sentient. I charged the Mirari with collecting information on the planes of the multiverse, and when it finally returned to me, it provided me with knowledge that would have taken millennia to learn on my own. I believed the Mirari had earned the right to walk and experience the world as a living being. And I wanted-offspring isn’t the right word…” “Kids?” Slobad offered. “One like me, but not me.” Karn replied.

• Previously we had no indication the thing was sentient, but I guess it could be. The fact that is collected information from multiple planes seems odd, as Moons of Mirrodin said many probes were send to many worlds. Perhaps the Mirari was some sort of hub-probe, gathering in one place all the information the other ones were collecting?
• Karn says Slobad’s willingness to sacrifice himself for his friends reminds him of Sisay (Well, he says “My… captain.”, but we know who that is.) I like the comparison, and I especially like that Herndon goes for her rather than comparing Slobad to the main hero Gerrard or the goblin Squee.

Slobad Planeswalker in Commander Legends?

TIMELINE

In The Moons of Mirrodin time was given in cycles, in The Darksteel Eye it was inconsistently given in both cycles and years, and now all pretense is dropped and we are just talking about years. Talking about cycles (or stardates, or parsecs, or whatever) is perhaps a cheap way to make your story sound more futuristic, but if you are going to do it, at least stick with it! This is just sloppy!

As mentioned in previous reviews, I'm going to stick this story at around 100 years after Scourge, and do a separate article on everything  wrong with the Mirrodin timeline soon. Unfortunately the eventual place the original Mirrodin trilogy takes on the timeline is too vague to do anything with the five year time skip in this novel on the timeline. 

As for relevant bits for the timeline discussion in The Fifth Dawn, there is just this little bit:

“The historians assured [Raksha] he had ranged wider and farther in his conquests and exploration than any Kha for a thousand years”.

A thousand years, eh? Sure sounds like a lot of time has passed since the prologue of Moons...